Archive for May 2011

Black is to make 19 consecutive moves, after which White checkmates Black in one move. Black may not move into check, and may not check White (except possibly on his last move). Black and White are cooperating to achieve the aim of checkmate. (In chess problem parlance, this problem is called a serieshelpmate in 19.) How many different solutions are there?

Then there’s also एनम् etc., which according to MW “Grammarians assert that the substitution of एनम् &c for इमम् or एतम् &c takes place when something is referred to which has already been mentioned in a previous part of the sentence”.

The amplification set is already the maximum possible without clipping. Don’t change anything, just click OK

This makes the file as loud as possible without clipping: without the loudest parts of the “signal” getting lost. If the result is not loud enough, the problem is not with the loudest parts (they are already as loud as they can be), but with the softer parts. So you need a transformation that makes the soft parts louder while keeping the loud parts the same. This is Dynamic range compression: the dynamic range (difference between softest and loudest parts) is compressed.

The first control (“Compress ratio”) is the main one. Or just leave it as it is. Click OK.

If still not loud enough, go back and increase Compress ratio. Of course, increasing it means decreasing the dynamic range — increase it too much and the parts meant to be soft will be no softer than the rest.

A common (or at least, more common than it should be) scenario: you find a PostScript file of some paper, clearly written in (La)TeX, but which looks blurry on screen and you cannot copy any text. Converting to PDF with, say, ps2pdf does not help either. You curse the .ps format, and put up with the blurriness or print it out (where it looks fine) to read it.

Turns out it doesn’t have to be this way. The problem is that the PS file is using bitmap fonts, but assuming you have the scalable (Type 1) versions of those same fonts on your system, you can convert the fonts! There’s a script called pkfix, distributed with TeX Live, which will take a ps file that uses bitmap fonts and try to convert it to use scalable fonts. Just run it as

pkfix inputfile.ps outputfile.ps

This should produce a PS which isn’t blurry and is searchable, but if you prefer PDF, the usual way will work

ps2pdf outputfile.ps

or on Mac OS X if you don’t have ps2pdf for some reason, o inputfile.ps -a macps2pdf where macps2pdf comes with MacGhostView.

If the file is very old (generated with dvips from before 1996) and pkfix doesn’t work, there’s a further script called pkfix-helper that may make the file appropriate for pkfix.

BTW, if it’s your own files that are coming out blurry, something is wrong with your setup. Just install the package cm-super from CTAN—sudo tlmgr install cm-super or whatever—and no other change is needed. Or you can use the lmodern fonts with \usepackage{lmodern}, but that shouldn’t be necessary.